The priming effect of competitor product information on advertising creativity

This article examines the manner in which advertising creativity may be influenced by “near” primes in the form of competitor product information that is presented at the briefing stage of engagement with a client. Drawing on the associative theory of creativity and spreading activation theory, this study explores the impact of near primes on both the originality and appropriateness of advertising output and highlights the process mechanism by which it affects overall creativity. Results of a between-subjects experiment indicate that exposing individuals to near primes results in a fixation effect that negatively influences originality but positively influences appropriateness. Associative cognitive flexibility, as measured by the number of “far” analogies accessed during ideation, is shown to be a strong mediator of the relationship between near prime exposure on creativity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Flexibility of thought in high creative individuals represented by percolation analysis

Flexibility of thought is theorized to play a critical role in the ability of high creative individuals to generate novel and innovative ideas. However, this has been examined only through indirect behavioral measures. Here we use network percolation analysis (removal of links in a network whose strength is below an increasing threshold) to computationally examine the robustness of the semantic memory networks of low and high creative individuals. Robustness of a network indicates its flexibility and thus can be used to quantify flexibility of thought as related to creativity. This is based on the assumption that the higher the robustness of the semantic network, the higher its flexibility. Our analysis reveals that the semantic network of high creative individuals is more robust to network percolation compared with the network of low creative individuals and that this higher robustness is related to differences in the structure of the networks. Specifically, we find that this higher robustness is related to stronger links connecting between different components of similar semantic words in the network, which may also help to facilitate spread of activation over their network. Thus, we directly and quantitatively examine the relation between flexibility of thought and creative ability. Our findings support the associative theory of creativity, which posits that high creative ability is related to a flexible structure of semantic memory. Finally, this approach may have further implications, by enabling a quantitative examination of flexibility of thought, in both healthy and clinical populations.

Initial training with difficult items does not facilitate category learning

In the phenomenon of transfer along a continuum (TAC), initial training on easy items facilitates later learning of a harder discrimination. TAC is a widely replicated cross-species phenomenon that is well predicted by certain kinds of associative theory. A recent report of an approximately opposite phenomenon (i.e., facilitation by initial training on hard items) poses a puzzle for such theories, but is predicted by a dual-system model (COVIS). However, across four experiments, we present substantial evidence that this counterintuitive finding was in error. Rather, the result appears to be a false positive and, as such, should not form part of the evidence base for COVIS nor be considered as a counter-example to the pervasive TAC phenomenon.

Generics and typicality

Cimpian et al. (2010) observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gsare f ’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn ageneric statement about it, we still interpret it in a much stronger way: (almost) all Gs are f .This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’ and ‘contingency’ from (associativelearning) psychology to provide a semantics of generics that explains why people accept genericsbased on weak evidence. We make use of the Heuristics and Biases approach of Tverskyand Kahneman (1974) and the Associative Theory of Probability Judgements to explain pragmaticallywhy people interpret generic statements in a much stronger way. The spirit of theapproach has much in common with Leslie’s (2008) cognition-based ideas about generics, butthe semantics is grounded on Cohen’s (1999) relative readings of generic sentences. The basicintuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f ’ is true, not because most Gs are (or tend tohave) f , but because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G.Keywords: generics, association, probabilities, pragmatics.